Monday, February 29, 2016

I haven´t died, I just had internet problems!

Elder Olivier's latest email that we got today!!!

Hi everyone!!!

So the past few weeks have been pretty crazy, full of hard work, heavy rain, thick mud, gostoso açaí, banana juice, indian bracelets, and pure alegria. And everyone making fun of my gringo accent. What do they expect? I´m a gringo!

For those of you who haven´t heard of açaí in your lives, imagine literally the best thing you could ever eat. There. Know you all know what it tastes like.

So here in Sena Madureira, there are tons of native indians. We´ve been teaching some of them, and a lot of them come to church every once in a while. We baptized João recently, who is from their tribe. He doesn´t always come to church though because he spends a lot of time at the tribe down the river. They are awesome. They always talk to us for a really long time when we visit them, and they always give us food. They also sell these bracelets, which are awesome. One of them is making bracelets for Elder Castelli and me.

Banana juice. Yes, it´s a thing. It tastes kind of like drinking a banana.

Speaking of juice, Elder Castelli and I started buying fruit pulp and making our own juice. Yeah, we make pretty good juice, no big deal. The best juice is graviola and cupuaçu, two of the many fruits that no one has ever heard of. Imagine the best juice you have ever had. There. Now you all know what they taste like.

Yesterday we had the baptism of a girl named Rute. The baptismal service only had a couple of people but it was super spiritual. For the closing hymn we sang How Great Thou Art, because it is one of the few hymns that she already knew, and it sounded more like 20 people were singing as opposed to 7 or 8.

Scripture of the week! I got called yesterday in church, literally at the last possible second to give a talk about Jesus Christ. This was the scripture that came to my mind:

2 Nephi 25:23, 26

23 For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.

26 And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins.

Right now my testimony is stronger than ever that Jesus Christ is the redeemer of the world. The church is true!